Regarding the 80 GB iPhone Capacity in the Activation and Sync Video

Tuesday, 26 June 2007

So in the activation and sync demo video Apple posted today, at the 6:15 mark it pans down in iTunes to the capacity meter, and, remarkably, shows an 80 GB capacity. I can think of two explanations:

(a) The demo screencast was recorded using a super-secret pre-production iPhone 2.0 with 80 GB hard drive; (b) the original 4 and 8 GB iPhones are still so secret that the screencast was recorded using an 80 GB iPod hacked to resemble an iPhone in iTunes; or (c) the whole thing was mocked up in Photoshop.

Before wetting yourself or slipping into a coma, please note that (b) and (c) are far more likely than (a). Even if there exist pre-production future iPhone models, the odds that they’d just give one to someone on the Apple.com production team are nearly zero. Note that at 6:24, you can see the full iTunes screen, and while the capacity at the bottom says 74 GB, the capacity in the summary at the top says 7.27 GB.

Update: Unsurprisingly, this glitch is now fixed in all versions of the video.

The more interesting detail in this demo screencast is that when it zooms in, the entire iTunes UI — buttons, text labels, even the mouse cursor — scales without jaggies. Some sort of private-to-Apple-at-least-for-now resolution independence?

Update: It could just be me. I ran this past a few friends who agree with me that they zoom into something slightly greater than 100 percent, but now a bunch of readers and friends are arguing that it’s just 100 percent.